iPad purchase plans sluggish, AdMob survey finds

Only one in six iPhone owners surveyed by Google-owned mobile ad network AdMob said that they “intend to purchase” an Apple iPad tablet computer. Among Android phone owners, the ratio dropped to one in seventeen.

The results, from an opt-in survey of 960 respondents that AdMob ran in January, strongly suggest that the iPad lacks the iPhone’s gotta-have-it hotness.

If you factor in the inevitability that not everyone who intends to buy an iPad will actually make the purchase, the numbers don’t look good for the device that Apple chief Steve Jobs is said to have called “the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

AdMob published the survey results as part of its monthly report on stats collected from its mobile ad network, which the company says serves ads to more than 15,000 mobile applications and mobile websites.

WebOS users are 3.4 times more likely to not recommend their device to others, compared to iPhone and iPod Touch users. Only two out of three said they would recommend their Palm phone, compared to ten out of eleven iPhone owners.

AdMob also claims that the number of ad requests to their network went up 32 percent between December and January, to a total of 15.2 billion ads.

Google acquired AdMob in November 2009 for $750 million. But I don’t believe the survey was fudged to make Google look good. If there’s a slant here, it’s that AdMob didn’t ask if anyone intends to purchase a tablet computer powered by Google’s Android or Chrome OS software.